These flights matter. It is the dawn of the democratization of space. There is a portion of the population who wants nothing more than to maximize personal safety and security. There's also a portion that wants to explore and expand into new domains. There's an arm-wrestling match between the two. It has been going on ever since the first proto-humans left East Africa to see what was going on in the rest of the world. Today the conflict also involves competition for resources, which makes it get nasty.
Branson, Musk, Bezos,
et al, have revolutionized space by devising ways to do a lot more and with a lot less. We are looking at the long-term democratization of space.
Here’s why Richard Branson’s flight matters—and, yes, it really matters
If I compare it to computers, there was a time when only governments and large corporations could afford a computer. When I got into it back in the early 80s, it cost me $2500 just to buy the parts and assemble my first PC. That's about $7K in today's money. It had 640K of ram, two 5.25 inch floppy drives, and a green monochrome monitor. And look at what we get today for a few hundred bucks.
It would take the resources of a superpower to come up with a Saturn V and put men on the moon or run the space shuttle program. Several hundred billion dollars in current money for Mercury, Gemini, Apollo. Another two hundred billion for the shuttle. The latest big booster is the SLS system with is likely to run several billion dollars per launch even if it is using old space shuttle engines. Everything gets thrown away, no reusability. That's just what happens to government projects. Private enterprise offers us the chance to do it for just a few percent of that.
I saw an analysis that showed the Falcon Heavy - with booster recovery - could do everything the SLS could do, you just have to launch it 4 times for every SLS launch. It would still cost a tenth as much. If we waited just a bit for Starship to mature, it would cost even less. There's also the ULA Vulcan Centaur when it comes online and hopefully Blue Origin's New Glen. There's also a whole raft of smallsat launchers that wouldn't exist if SpaceX hadn't paved the way.
I am all in favor of letting private sector billionaires compete for the business and I don't mind if they become even bigger billionaires because of it.